Businesses are increasingly adopting the digital transformation route to keep pace with emerging market trends, increased competition, and fluctuating customer demands. However, traditional network architectures are not compatible with managing the complexities and workloads of most digital initiatives.
More problematic is that the business-linked services are often distributed throughout multiple clouds, which can hamper network performance further, particularly at the branch locations.
No wonder the tech-savvy network operation experts are turning towards SD-WAN (software-defined WAN). SD-WAN benefits organisations by lowering overhead costs and enhancing network performance. Additionally, it cuts down on costly routing and hardware expenses while providing businesses with the flexibility to access multi-cloud services.
Thus, businesses opt for SD-WAN to lower overhead costs and effectively support digital transformation’s new services and applications. This technology simplifies the operation and management of WANs and even delivers several business benefits.
Let us look at how businesses reap the benefits of SD-WAN solutions.
Benefits of SD-WAN Solutions
Improved performaSD-WAN – 5 Benefits You Must Know
Not all network traffic is the same. Fortunately, SD-WAN solutions can be configured to prioritise real-time services such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and steer over the most efficient route. The IT team can reduce latency problems, promote employee productivity, and boost staff morale by facilitating critical apps through high-performance and reliable connections.
Enhanced security
Digital transformation is a double-edged sword. While it can improve customer satisfaction and extend market reach, it can also expose your business to considerable security risks, which must raise significant concerns.
The great news is that many of the SD-WAN solutions provide in-built security. Thus, make sure to look out for SD-WAN solutions that offer a wide range of security features like encryption, NGFW, IPS, and sandboxing to prevent downtime, data loss, legal liabilities, and regulatory violations.
Reduced complexity
The digital transformation adds layers of complexity to your network. It results in poor network performance risk and an overtaxed information technology team. Further, this makes it necessary for you to locate onsite personnel at remote sites to manage your local IT infrastructure better. Luckily, SD-WAN is one of the managed services prevalent today that can ease the IT burden and simplify the WAN infrastructure.
SD-WAN using broadband can deactivate non-critical business apps, automate monitoring tasks, and manage traffic via a centralised controller. Thus, look for an SD-WAN solution that can be integrated into your local branch infrastructure and drive security into the local LAN.
Cloud usage
Businesses are increasingly opting for cloud services. The good news is that SD-WAN allows direct cloud access at remote branches, thereby reducing the backhauling traffic from clouds and branch offices via the data centre.
It means the workers can directly access cloud applications irrespective of location, without burdening the core network with more traffic to secure and manage.
Moreover, SD-WAN improves cloud application performance along all channels by prioritising essential business apps and providing a direct internet connection to the branches.
Reduced costs
As businesses deploy popular cloud-based apps, the amount of information and data traversing over the WAN increases operating expenses exponentially. Here is where SD-WAN implementation can help lower this cost by leveraging low-cost internet access that provides direct access to the cloud and reduces the traffic over WAN.
As per a survey by IDC, a quarter of respondents consider SD-WAN to save costs by 39 %, with the other two-thirds anticipating modest savings of between 5% and 19 %.
In conclusion, SD-WAN is an advanced software-defined overlay to an existing WAN that improves the network based on security, efficiency, scalability, and performance.
Paul is an content marketing strategist and serial entrepreneur.